Saturday, December 8, 2007

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

I'm so excited...I just got permission to visit the Harvey Milk High School, which is the school for at-risk LGBT kids in New York, a part of the Hetrick-Martin Institute. I'm going to try to organize a literary festival there with other novelists who write for gay teens, and I'm really hoping that I can get the students to contribute some original fiction and poetry for my book on gay and lesbian teen literature.

I feel like this is what I need to do in New York...this is a big, big thing that I want to do, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with academia...it's all about being a writer and being queer. I love it. I hope it works out! Cross your fingers.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Got the proofs for Night Child today from Penguin. As always, it's more than a little surreal to see that Penguin logo on a letter addressed to me, and I have to pinch myself and remember that, yes, I actually fucking did this. I said I would publish a novel when I was 12, and it only took 16 years to finally get it done.

Also attended Queer-CUNY VIII, the queer grad conference at CUNY today, which was incredible in so many ways. I went to a small community college for my B.A., and for the 7 years that I spent in grad school I was almost always the only queer student in my department. Being at this conference was an entirely different experience: there were people EVERYWHERE, brilliant and beautiful queer academics, crammed into hallways, filling up classrooms, running between panels. This was the first conference I've ever been to where nobody noticed that panels were going overtime; where everyone actually seemed interested in each presenter; where audience members actually supported each other rather than just bickering and tearing each other down.

I was overwhelmed. I still am. I made pages worth of notes, and when I ran out of paper, I started scribbling furiously on my file-folder. One of the contributors, Julian Wolfe (who works as a youth counselor), mentioned some great resources for at-risk and homeless LGBT-Q youth in the New York area that I thought I would list here:

This is one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen: inmates at a prison in the Philippines being controlled and broken down through choreography and forced to perform "Thriller" endlessly. What the fuck is going on in these prisons, and how is this any better than Abu Ghraib?

Thea Tagle, a doctoral student at UC-San Diego, is doing ethnographic work on this as we speak. Check her out.